A lady from Australia has been charged of the murder three people after they may have contracted a mushroom poisoning.
After Erin Patterson’s was arrested on Thursday morning, the police searched her home in east Melbourne.
The three, which included her ex-in-laws, became unwell after Patterson, 49, served the family lunch. There was one more survivor.
According to toxicology findings, the victims may have eaten deathcap mushrooms. Patterson however insists she is not guilty.
She has stated that, on July 29, at the lunch in the Victorian town of Leongatha, she did not purposefully poison her guests.
Though he had been invited as well, her ex-husband Simon Patterson was unable to attend the family lunch at the last minute.
Once she and her two kids seemed unharmed following the meal, investigators designated Erin Patterson as a suspect.
In a news conference, Homicide Squad Inspector Dean Thomas emphasized the case’s intricacy and described it as a tragedy that might “reverberate for years to come”.
Thomas further said, “I cannot think of another investigation that has generated this level of media and public interest, not only here in Victoria, but also nationally and internationally.”
The lunch was attended by Patterson’s ex-husband’s parents, Gail and Don Patterson, as well as Gail Patterson’s sister Heather Wilkinson and brother-in-law, Ian Wilkinson.
Police said that on July 30, the four were admitted to the hospital with a violent sickness.
Ms Wilkinson, sixty-six, and the Patterson couple, seventy-one, were dead within days. Following two months of medical care, Mr. Wilkinson, 68, made a full recovery after being admitted to the hospital in a severe condition.
Erin Patterson has stated that she was hospitalized for stomach aches following the dinner, where she received medicine to prevent liver damage and was placed on a saline drip.
She claimed to have used dried mushrooms from an Asian grocery store and button mushrooms she had acquired from a supermarket to make a beef wellington pie.
A statement that Patterson wrote in August read, “I am now devastated to think that these mushrooms may have contributed to the illness suffered by my loved ones. I really want to repeat that I had absolutely no reason to hurt these people, whom I loved.”
Ozioma Samuel-Ugwuezi
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